Queen Vicotira A Feminist? A Sexy Woman?

November 11, 1990|By LOIS SPRATLEY Book Reviewer

Queen Victoria, a feminist? An oxymoron, surely.

Well, maybe not. The queen, who was often photographed looking like a dumpy, grumpy old hag, lent her very name to an era that came to symbolize prudery and plodding complacency. Yet careful study of the Victorian Age demolishes those faulty perceptions of both the period and its monarch. That epoch of British Empire expansion seems now to have been a proper, if fake, storefront behind which people behaved pretty much as they always have and presumably always will. And, far from being dour, for most of her life, Queen Victoria was a vibrant, sexy, complex woman, who although disapproving of professions for women, had a political career herself.

Into this contradictory crossfire jumps British activist Dorothy Thompson. It is her contention that, because she was a woman, Queen Victoria, benefiting from the previous popularity of royal sisterhood particularly Princess Charlotte and Queen Caroline, not only stabilized the monarchy, but saved England from the republican upheavals sweeping through 19 Century Europe.

Possibly. But Thompson's hard-to-come-by `evidence' is sometimes skewed or even silly. With a straight face, for instance, she suggests that Victoria's strong constitution may be the result of being breast-fed by her mother (rather than a wet nurse). And her examination of Queen Caroline makes no mention of what a dingbat she was. Stranger still is the fact that Thompson's implied feminist syllogism stops at the water's edge, i.e. the 1901 death of Queen Victoria. Why not apply those same theories to Queen Victoria and her great-great granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II in particular or even 20th century women in general?

Nevertheless, Thompson has put considerable research and much imagination into this women's lib view of 19th-century England. As such it will read with profit and pleasure by scholars, feminists and Victoriana fans.